(08-03-2013 11:40 AM)Starcrash Wrote: That means that I, too, am probably delusional. I disagree with the vast majority of mathematicians on the concept of whether .999... = 1 and with the vast majority of scientists on whether global warming is truly a concern. I recognize that there are plenty of rational people on the other side of these questions, so there's a good chance that I might be wrong on one or both of them. I think it's healthy to recognize my weak positions and be willing to depart from them if given proper evidence, but I'm not swayed by the popularity alone on the other side of them either.

I thought we settled that one.

1/9 = 0.11111...
9/9 = 0.99999...

QED.

I've gone to great lengths to explain exactly why that first premise (1/9 = .111...) is wrong. Every time you divide, to get it to become equal (rather than almost equal) you have to add in the carried remainder (.1, then .01, then .001, etc.). That remainder gets smaller and smaller but never disappears because 9 will never evenly divide in 10, no matter how many times you do it.

I've written a blog about this, addressing every possible angle of why .999... does not equal 1, shown several tests of the conclusion that demonstrate it's wrong, and show why every "proof" is mistaken. And yet, the overwhelming popularity of .999 = 1 convinces everyone that it must be right.

My girlfriend is mad at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried cooking a stick in her non-stick pan.

I addressed that one in blog form and in video. It fails in premise 2, because multiplying any real number by 10 will leave you with one less digit after the decimal point. Infinitely long numbers are not an exception to the rules that pertain to finitely long numbers -- that's special pleading. In the video I showed how the math works out correctly (ending in x = .999, not x = 1) when you take this rule into consideration.

My girlfriend is mad at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried cooking a stick in her non-stick pan.

(08-03-2013 11:45 AM)PleaseJesus Wrote: First, there are many, many, born again Christians all over the world. But because people have free will and can and do choose whether to worship the God they know not does not make them delusional... but there is a decided difference between the many people who vote for or against an Obama and those people who claim he does not exist...

Again, this argument from popularity despite the fact that you don't accept it in cases where it doesn't make your point. Who cares if there are many, many Christians all over the world? There are many, many Muslims all over the world and yet you don't think that makes Islam true.

Worshiping a god that doesn't exist is delusional by definition. Since I've learned from experience that you're unlikely to check citation, the meaning of delusional is more or less "seeing things that don't exist". By that definition, you see the worshipers of Islam as delusional. The reasons they believe in their god are nearly identical to the reasons that you believe in your god, and yet you think that their reasons are bad and yours are good (evidenced by the fact that you believe in your god and not theirs).

I have good evidence that Obama exists. I've observed him with my eyes, heard his words, and seen the result of actions that most people would claim are his. The main reason that I can feel confident that my observations are real is that they conform to the observations that others have made. We see the same thing, hear the same words, and argue over the same things that we believe have been done by him. God's actions, on the other hand, look an awful lot like things that we can explain with different causes. His words are less clear and usually spoken to individuals -- in fact, I don't know of a single modern case of God speaking to a group. Have you ever been in prayer and asked the person beside you "what was that last word? I couldn't quite hear what God was saying," to get a re-iteration of what you just heard with that last word added? Of course not, because God doesn't speak to groups. Hallucinations, inner monologue, and guesses at what a person *might* say if they spoke are all private revelations that don't reflect an outside influence. Muslims say they get answers to prayer too, and there's a good reason why you don't believe them.

My girlfriend is mad at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried cooking a stick in her non-stick pan.

(08-03-2013 09:28 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: Starcrash, no offense, but you are in fact misapplying subtraction. .111... * 9 does equal 9.999... in the same way that 7.777... * 9 = 6.999...

And your disproof of Cantor's diagonal proof is laughable.

No offense mate, but what maths education do you have?

I'm well-educated, but don't make an ad hominem attack. If you think that I'm mistaken in showing up Cantor's diagonal proof, then you ought to be able to explain why. Don't waste my time with an argument from ridicule.

And don't straw-man my argument. I didn't say that .111 * 9 doesn't equal .999... it does. What it doesn't equal is 1, which is the number that it should equal if you do the math in reverse (X / Y = Z only if Z * Y = X). And to assume that it does because you think that .999... = 1 is begging the question.

I said that 1/9 doesn't equal .111... exactly. Let me explain in detail:

If you divide 1 by 9, you get .1 (with a remainder of .1). How do I know that this remainder is there? For one thing, it's the number left hanging at the bottom of the equation after dividing, but more importantly if I do the math in reverse by multiplying by what I divided by (multiplying .1 by 9) I find that I'm .1 short. The remainder is important for getting an even sum. If I divide by 9 twice, I get .11 (with a remainder of .01, since that hanging remainder has been carried twice through 2 divisions). This remainder gets smaller and smaller but never disappears -- no matter how many times you divide, that remainder still shows up under your subtraction.

The error made here by most people is a rounding error, where they believe that the remainder is so small that it isn't worth bothering with and they just round it down to 0.

My girlfriend is mad at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried cooking a stick in her non-stick pan.

I wasn't making an ad hominem attack, Starcrash, I was trying to find out what your maths experience was because it's important. You seem to be missing several critical concepts that I was introduced to in Calculus 101, so if you haven't taken a calculus course that would explain why you don't get it. But it is not based on a rounding error.

I'm not a mathematician, and I'm not going to try to argue like one. You say you've argued with mathematicians and weren't convinced. Specifically, you mentioned in your Cantor post that mathematicians had pointed out that the proof doesn't involve creating "new" real numbers, thus your original argument was a strawman; instead of removing the strawman argument and replacing it with a new one, you left an addendum with a trivial rejection of the stance, as if the very people who use Cantor's proof don't understand it.

Don't take this personal and don't get emotional. I'm just saying, maybe your arguments aren't as sound as you think, and you may be making strawman arguments of your own.

(08-03-2013 09:55 PM)Phaedrus Wrote: I wasn't making an ad hominem attack, Starcrash, I was trying to find out what your maths experience was because it's important. You seem to be missing several critical concepts that I was introduced to in Calculus 101, so if you haven't taken a calculus course that would explain why you don't get it. But it is not based on a rounding error.

I'm not a mathematician, and I'm not going to try to argue like one. You say you've argued with mathematicians and weren't convinced. Specifically, you mentioned in your Cantor post that mathematicians had pointed out that the proof doesn't involve creating "new" real numbers, thus your original argument was a strawman; instead of removing the strawman argument and replacing it with a new one, you left an addendum with a trivial rejection of the stance, as if the very people who use Cantor's proof don't understand it.

Don't take this personal and don't get emotional. I'm just saying, maybe your arguments aren't as sound as you think, and you may be making strawman arguments of your own.

I'm not taking this personal or getting emotional. I identified it as an ad hominem attack because it is by definition. It makes no difference who presents an argument (such as an educated person or uneducated) because the argument can be identical from both sources. It's nice of you to add your personal education, but I didn't ask because I instantly recognize it as unimportant. Your arguments will stand or fall on their own.

If you read my blog, you'd notice that I answered your argument about Cantor's argument creating "new" real numbers, specifically the objection that I get with such opponents claiming that this isn't their intent. I'll just quote it from the blog verbatim since you missed it the first time.

Quote: So I hope by now you can readily see why Cantor’s diagonal argument is not a paradox — it doesn’t do what it proposes to do. I’ve had mathematicians argue that this isn’t what it proposes to do, arguing that this argument isn’t supposed to create a “new” real number, but there are issues with that. For one thing, those who bring forth this argument always suggest that the newly minted number can be “added to the column to make another number”… in which case, why use the diagonal instead of just adding an infinite number of your choosing? Either way, you’ll have a duplicate number in that column. For another thing, the supposed reason given by Wikipedia and others for this argument is that it demonstrates that the real numbers are “uncountable”… but isn’t an infinite set’s uncountability, immeasurability, and incalculability true of infinite sets by definition? And while it may be seen as begging the question to assume that the real numbers between 0 and 1 are infinite without the diagonal argument, there are other ways to figure out if a set is infinite… after all, did we need the diagonal argument to prove that the positive integers make up an infinite set? Of course not.

My girlfriend is mad at me. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried cooking a stick in her non-stick pan.

(04-03-2013 06:46 PM)Dom Wrote: I think that there are people that are neither delusional nor lying who claim god spoke to them.
They are just misinterpreting a thought process in their brain.
You can have an experience of some sort and it makes you ask yourself: "WTF is this"? Then you answer yourself with; "Well, it's xyz".
It's just a thought process, but people can interpret it as someone replying. They think that they did not know the answer. But it popped into their head. Where did it come from? Must have been god.

What makes them to interpret the thought process in this manner? There should be a reason behind this mechanism. Even though they are not asking themselves about why that thought popped into their head and don't have logical explanations to it, they can still believe in something unconsciously.
There's an unconscious thinking pattern that everybody follows... for different weird reasons.

"The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason." - Benjamin Franklin